Towards a Universal Implementation of 3D User Interaction Techniques

This paper presents a versatile - write once, use everywhere - approach of standardizing the development of three-dimensional user interaction techniques. In order to achieve a platform and application independent implementation of 3D interaction techniques (ITs), we propose to implement the related techniques directly in the tracking middleware. Therefore a widely used tracking framework was extended by a Python binding to allow straight forward scripting of ITs. We cluster existing 3D ITs, into those which can be fully, partly or not implemented in the tracking middleware. A number of examples demonstrate how various interaction techniques can quickly and efficiently be implemented in the middleware and are therefore fully independent of the underlying application. We hint at how this approach can be used to decouple menu system control from the application with the final goal to help establishing standards for 3D interaction.